Chuck Sweeny: Let nominating process play itself out

Wednesday

Mar 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 26, 2008 at 12:14 PM

On the way to work Monday, I listened to a National Public Radio chat show. Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a guest of veteran talk show host Diane Rehm, was extremely distressed at the prospect of Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battling for the party’s nomination all the way to the Denver convention in late August.

Chuck Sweeny

On the way to work Monday, I listened to a National Public Radio chat show. Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a guest of veteran talk show host Diane Rehm, was extremely distressed at the prospect of Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battling for the party’s nomination all the way to the Denver convention in late August.

The Democratic governor, who is neutral, said a prolonged fight could ruin either Democrat’s chances in November against John McCain, who has the Republican nomination wrapped up. The Arizona senator is building general election support by globe-trotting with friend and possible running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut.

Here’s Bredesen’s plan: If neither Clinton nor Obama wins the 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination by June 3, the date of the last two primaries, Democrats should hold a bosses-only miniconvention of the 794 “superdelegates” to pick the nominee well before the Aug. 25-28 convention.

Bredesen said he’s getting positive response to his plan among Democratic leaders. I think what Bredesen proposes is unnecessarily risky to the Dems’ claim to be the “party of the people.”

Times have changed since the 19th and early 20th centuries, when party bosses routinely picked presidential candidates. The most historic of the “brokered” conventions took place in Chicago in 1860. After three raucous ballots, wily Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln defeated the party’s favorite, New York Gov. William Seward, and 10 other candidates for the GOP nomination.

The 20th century saw the gradual advance of primaries and caucuses to give real people access to the nominating process. Still, in 1920, in another Chicago convention, Warren Harding won the Republican nomination as a result of lengthy negotiations that took place at The Blackstone Hotel, in the original “smoke-filled room.”

In the television era, we haven’t seen a suspense-filled convention since the Democrats met in Los Angeles in 1960 to choose John Kennedy. JFK won on the first ballot because he picked potential foe Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, as his running mate. The Democrats created superdelegates in the early 1980s, giving governors, senators, congressmen and other party leaders the potential to select a nominee in a deadlocked convention.

Let the candidates campaign for superdelegate support just as they contest the nine remaining primary states. A summerlong fight to the finish for the nomination won’t make much difference to voters in November. Americans have a famously short attention span. And no right-minded citizen pays attention to politics in the summertime. Even now the Clinton-Obama fracas has largely become background noise in our daily lives. If the Democrats need a few more months to discover their true nominee, it’s OK by me.

Meanwhile, McCain has shown he’s fully capable of shooting himself in the foot. The Arizona senator is running on the strength of his foreign policy expertise, but last week in Iraq, Lieberman corrected McCain when he said Iran is helping al-Qaida, the Sunni extremist group. Iran is suspected of helping Shiite extremists in Iraq. It’s kind of an important distinction.

I’m sure McCain can turn off just as many voters as either Obama or Clinton can.